


Nothing But Time and a Face That You Knew

by little_giddy



Category: Dark City 1998
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 20:50:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_giddy/pseuds/little_giddy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh, to lie in a bath of lackluster shapes and wonder at rising.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing But Time and a Face That You Knew

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zoi no miko](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Zoi+no+miko).



Title: Nothing but time and a face that you knew  
Fandom: Dark City (film)  
Words: 2038  
Warnings: none  
Rating: PG  
Summary: John Murdoch / Dr. Daniel Schreber.

_I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination... The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth._  
\- John Keats

\---

Oh, to lie in a bath of lackluster shapes and wonder at rising.

Dr. Daniel Schreber stares at the ceiling, droplets of condensation threatening to fall and shatter the stillness of the moment. It is a stillness manufactured carefully and maintained through the burn of entering the too-hot oblong of water until it cools around him and takes on a murkiness that could only have come from his pores.

The culmination of the beginning had found Daniel sitting by a darkened bath with a man's body shot through its waters; it is the first day of light in the city, and Daniel hopes making a body of water into ritual will allow him to begin again.

\---

He rises with the night, a habit he will endeavour to break soon enough, soon enough, he thinks, and goes to walk the city. With so many years of this walk behind him, it is an absurdity that it lasts an age. Surely, Daniel knows, it should melt into nothingness by being a thing so routine, but then it occurs to him.

This is the first time he has had no itinerary to think through on his walk.

The city does not notice midnight any more than the passage of any other segment of time and he relishes the flow of minute to minute without a pause for redistribution.

The shifting was deliberate, they now know. They will never realise how efficient and precise it was. Everyone changed but not always by much: only those who needed to be changed and those who would notice it. For some, an entire identity filled the space behind their eyes and tinted or tainted their view anew in the morning. For some, the man who sold them a newspaper had always been a tanned brown-haired man, when before he had always been blond and pale, a mere incision into memory with a subtlety Daniel could almost wondrous.

Daniel hears the questions as people walk around him. _How are you_ has become _who are you._

For most of them, the answer is still the same and the thought of the thoughts, the energy, wasted on the asking and the answering wearies Daniel. He tugs his coat tighter around him and takes care to step on the pavement, watching the edge while he looks at the ground. It is as if they do not know that everything is different, when it _is_ and they _do_, so mundane is their conception of it. Only he cannot tell them, those murmuring 'but how do we know it was-' and 'only time will tell if it's really-,' which ones have been themselves for longest and which he placed and married and separated only days before.

He knows the human mind better than any psychologist ever has and can see that path - that it brings no good and much ill. Notions of purity of identity are absurd in their situation: the only chance for their fledgling civilisation is equal uncertainty for all, no chance of redeeming a past now useless to them for all, and eventually, a universal resolution to move forward.

Once, he built his rebellion and his words on knowing, not where or what he was before the Strangers, but on knowing that there was an absence of such knowledge. He built himself again around it, taking it into account and naming himself for the author of a book he'd read once and now doesn't remember reading. _Memoirs of my Nervous Illness_: it was a joke to sustain him and its humour had only gotten blacker as he faded under their rule, his ability to mimic the speech patterns of those humans whose stories he wrote growing neglected.

It occurs to him that he has a destination in mind.

And that the privilege once his alone in the City - to know, to be aware of being a fabrication and so to choose to authenticate it - is now a burden shared. He thinks he knows how to make it a fraction lighter still.

\---

Oh, they thought only they knew the spinning disc of a city had a warren of an underside, but they were wrong.

They forced Daniel to erase himself, to erase them all again and again. Through every experiment, Daniel had hidden this.

Dark, cold walls and spiral steps; he descends through the underground until he finds it. He's following a memory he wrote into the walls of his mind, to be released only if the Strangers were gone, and his body chemicals the otherwise impossible key. They'd bound him so tightly, narrowed his parameters for his own implanted self, that few events could cause the lines to veer from the medium average. Given he was the last (not now, not now, his mind cries out) truly sentient of his kind in their pen, he was unlikely to be stimulated in any other manner.

It is a deeper darkness than the City above ever saw, this vault in its foundations. And tracing fingers across door handles and stumbling over unseen obstacles, Daniel realises he cannot raise the library alone.

\---

Bumstead is incredulous. He is also, apparently, the mayor.

'Today only,' he explains in his low burr of a voice with bleak humour, 'and only because no one thought else order might be useful to the point of implementing it.'

'Yes. The Strangers - yes, they are quite, quite gone,' Daniel replies, blinking and watching the man's mouth twist into something that isn't a frown. 'There will be no- you will be the mayor tomorrow, yes.'

'Not that, man,' he looks across the desk with pity and amusement, 'Politics. They never change. What do you need?'

\---

What he needs is one John Murdoch.

He is a sketch of a man in daylight as well as night.

Now he knows this and removes himself from those whose world he has built.

Daniel considers the two vials and a syringe before he leaves the apartment he's claimed in the reshuffle. In one, there is the closest reconstruction of his own mind he was able to create. In the other, a lifetime lived in varying proximity to John Murdoch's equally synthetic memories.

The second was created against him being an even wilder element and harder to predict than even Daniel had believed possible. If, after being given a past worthy of preparing his abilities, he'd spun beyond the reach of wisdom or control, Daniel had prepared a vial to give him knowledge of John's life, John's training, John's desires and the ways he could be reached.

Daniel had been desperate enough to release his latent abilities and self-aware enough to know that, after that, very little could have stopped him. Had he wished to rip the very stars asunder, Daniel suspected it would be within him.

A sketch of a man but one Daniel had watched through life after life, incarnation after memory. And through it all, trusted.

Trusted enough, he should think, yet doesn't.

The vials stay where they are when he leaves.

\---

John doesn't say much.

Daniel finds the encounter awkward, even more so than most, and he's had a few of them lately with self-aware humans.

'I know how it was for you now,' John says when Daniel's explained what he would like him to do and why in halting phrases because the idea sounds so very cliche when said out loud. Like adding a childhood tragedy to ensure a tortured soul will fall for another. Is this what he is ministering yet again, except to the City?

'But I'll do this,' John continues, looking away from the window. 'It's a good idea, you know.'

Daniel smiles.

\---

They wander the library and return to the surface. Police trained and barely recruited have set up a perimeter around the area.

John steps to the side - Daniel's part is known but the City's true saviour is an unknown, a God among them with scuffed shoes from the unswept streets.

Daniel has informed the City that he installed a mechanism to raise the building at the appointed time, which, he thinks, is partly true. John grins at the joke and Daniel blinks, the unexpected expression causing him to realise painfully, suddenly that the Strangers could hack his mind but not his physiology.

Then John focuses, then the library comes up from the surface of the City like a sword through still water before jumbling and rumbling itself into a secure place, sweat breaking out on John's skin as the doors fall open with a strange, hollow slam. It's a stylistic touch Daniel wasn't expecting but delights in; he's been _practicing_.

The applause falls to Daniel when the stunned hush of the citizens fades and their curiosity gets the better of them.

What he's given them, they say, euphoric, what he's _given them._

It's not their pasts, nothing so specific, but it is a copy of a collective archive from a world they were once taken from. They can look in the books, in the past that isn't their own anymore, and find a common fascination.

What _they've_ given them, Daniel thinks as he exits ungracefully, is a start.

\---

John coughs at the vials on Daniel's desk weeks later. They have thrown themselves among the proles, Daniel thinks with amusement, to the library, reading without end across its shelves each day, and now they have retired for dinner like two old gents in smoking jackets. (There was a day in the 18th century, although he is careful how he phrases it in case John thinks it is an idea to be tested, though the chances of this are slim. Unsurprisingly, it is a quiet section. The exhibition of Dis/utopian Works of Old Earth was wildly popular, on the other hand.) The boundaries of the City and its lack of forests keep the library at its heart, almost impossible to reproduce.

'I know we've only known each other weeks,' John says without prompting.

'Yes- yes, this is physically true,' Daniel replies.

'But it is reassuring to have an old friend,' John answers with an ironic grin.

Daniel hides his smile in pouring them drinks.

That isn't what they are, not at all. They are embedded in each other's mind as sure as the City itself, this City they are falling for despite their true memories of its horrors.

It remains unspoken that they are new. Daniel only now begins to laugh freely, to speak in words that flow rather than walk down a set of stairs. He only now begins to speak, he realised that day in the library, when it is not necessary to do so; for the joy of it.

They are taking the time of a slow, thick drink to integrate and transcend the selves they once were. The City moves on, abandons its recent past to embrace the newest of the new, but they are taking the time. Daniel knows how many selves John lives with within his mind, how he is stepping above them to remember and honour them all. Daniel is doing the same.

For all the things they have in common are largely the contents of a vial, it is certain and it is theirs and truly known to both.

There will be more in future. They each know the rushing of their blood at the summoning of memories, cannot escape the now built-in feeling of _waiting_ on the other for the longest of lifetimes and do not seem to want to try. But the end is only where they start from; with so much more hanging in the air like the trailing end of a sentence, they take the time for a drink.

END


End file.
